The country’s constitutional court will now decide the President’s fate.

Her dismissal would require new elections, which must in any event take place before December 2017.

The constitutional crisis has implications not only for South Korean domestic policy but also for its tortured relations with the Pyongyang regime in the north - tensions that are further exacerbated by difficulties with an assertive China and South Korea's longstanding alliance with the United States.

The daughter of military dictator, subsequently President, Park Chun Hee, who ruled the country autocratically from 1961 until his assassination in 1979, Geun-hye came to power in 2012 on a wave of conservative nostalgia.

Her father presided over the rapid modernisation of the country in the Cold War, which ran very hot on the Korean peninsula between 1951-3, culminating in the division between a Communist North ‘as close as lips and teeth’ to Beijing and the US-backed South.

Since 1998, when the liberal government of Kim Dae-jung government embarked on a ‘sunshine policy’ of openness to North Korea, successive South Korean administrations have faced an intractable regional political and economic dilemma.

China's reluctance to restrain North Korea saw Pyongyang conduct further intermediate range ballistic missile and nuclear tests between June and September.

South Korea’s Ministry of Defense subsequently announced it would bring forward THAAD deployment ‘as soon as possible’, a move Beijing considered provocative and ‘anti-China’.

Relations with both China and North Korea have sunk to their lowest ebb since the 1970s.

Given that opinion in South Korea is deeply divided over the THAAD deployment, Beijing will view the government’s current embarrassment ripe for exploitation and a useful pawn in the escalating contest for regional power with the incoming Trump regime.